Steve Bannon

Steve Bannon Is the Latest Trump Associate to Be Harassed in Public

This summer has seen many of Trump’s current and former staffers confronted by the ire of angry citizens. Most recently, a spat between Sarah Huckabee Sanders and the owner of a restaurant in Lexington, Virginia, caused an unaffiliated restaurant with the same name in a different part of the state to be flooded with angry messages after Sanders tweeted about being asked to leave. On Saturday, while former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, back from his dystopian tour of Europe, was browsing in a Richmond, Virginia, bookstore, a woman confronted him and called him a “piece of trash.”

“Steve Bannon was simply standing, looking at books, minding his own business. I asked her to leave, and she wouldn’t,” the owner of Black Swan Books, Nick Cooke, told the Richmond Times-Dispatch. “And I said, ‘I’m going to call the police if you don’t,’ and I went to call the police and she left. And that’s the end of the story.”

Richmond police confirmed they had gotten a call from Cooke around 3:15 P.M., and that it was canceled before any responders were sent to the store. “We are a bookshop. Bookshops are all about ideas and tolerating different opinions and not about verbally assaulting somebody, which is what was happening,” Cooke said. Cooke declined to answer when asked whether he had a personal relationship with Bannon, who grew up in Richmond and attended Benedictine High School.

Trump’s current and former administration members have been feeling the heat from citizens in the past few weeks: last month, Kirstjen Nielsen was confronted at a Mexican restaurant after defending separating children from their families at the border, and earlier this week a mother with her baby confronted scandal-plagued E.P.A. Administrator Scott Pruitt in a D.C. restaurant and told him to resign.